Conventional convolutional kernels are typically defined on fixed discrete grids, limiting their ability to accommodate heterogeneous local structures. Existing adaptive operators improve flexibility but often couple geometric scale variation with content-dependent filtering, while incurring high computational cost from per-location kernel generation. To decouple geometric scale adaptation from content-dependent filtering while avoiding expensive per-location kernel generation, we propose Continuous Relative-scale KAN (Core-KAN), a relative-scale-conditioned continuous convolution operator. Core-KAN maps input features into a compact latent basis space and uses a lightweight scale controller to predict local scales relative to an exponential moving average reference. A KAN-based generator represents depth-wise kernel bases as continuous coordinate functions, allowing the operator to synthesize spatial filters at arbitrary resolutions rather than being confined to a fixed lattice. Instead of synthesizing independent kernels at every location, it constructs a compact bank of scale-conditioned kernel responses and interpolates them according to the predicted local scale map. An independent mixing controller further combines the interpolated basis responses based on local content, explicitly decoupling geometric scale adaptation from content-dependent filtering. Together with lightweight pointwise projections, this design forms a low-rank dynamic convolution that scales efficiently with kernel size and integrates readily into hierarchical vision backbones. Experiments across three representative vision tasks show Core-KAN consistently outperforms strong convolutional and dynamic-kernel baselines with only marginal parameter and computational overhead, offering an efficient, general framework for continuous, scale-adaptive convolution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19817
Deep Learning models can include billions of parameters or more, making it difficult to explain their internal transformations and outputs. However, explainability is increasing in importance due to the use of AI in crucial applications. This paper focuses on the interpretability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Building on the popular gradient based method LayerCAM for extracting internal features in CNNs, we propose an improved method named HiRA-CAM, and show that it outperforms both LayerCAM and Grad-CAM on creating useful saliency maps for object classification. The main feature of HiRA-CAM is its adaptive use of activation maps from all the layers of the CNN to arrive at a more focused saliency map.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19407
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as, drones pose increasing risks in civilian and defense settings, demanding accurate and real-time drone detection systems. However, detecting drones is challenging because of their small size, rapid movement, and low visual contrast. A modified architecture of YolovN called the YolovN-CBi is proposed that incorporates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) to improve sensitivity to small object detections. A curated training dataset consisting of 28K images is created with various flying objects and a local test dataset is collected with 2500 images consisting of very small drone objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, along with the local test dataset. The baseline Yolov5 and the proposed Yolov5-CBi architecture outperform newer Yolo versions, including Yolov8 and Yolov12, in the speed-accuracy trade-off for small object detection. Four other variants of the proposed CBi architecture are also proposed and evaluated, which vary in the placement and usage of CBAM and BiFPN. These variants are further distilled using knowledge distillation techniques for edge deployment, using a Yolov5m-CBi teacher and a Yolov5n-CBi student. The distilled model achieved a mA@P0.5:0.9 of 0.6573, representing a 6.51% improvement over the teacher's score of 0.6171, highlighting the effectiveness of the distillation process. The distilled model is 82.9% faster than the baseline model, making it more suitable for real-time drone detection. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed CBi architecture, together with the distilled lightweight models in advancing efficient and accurate real-time detection of small UAVs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18046
Dual-arm robotic grasping is essential for manipulating large, heavy, and geometrically complex objects that cannot be reliably handled using a single manipulator. These large objects often contain only sparse graspable regions determined by local geometric properties such as thickness, edge structure, and gripper clearance. Prior bimanual grasping methods assume access to a full point cloud of the object which inherently contains this geometric information, but may not be accessible in real scenarios. This work proposes PartialBiGrasp, a dual-arm grasp generation framework that operates directly on partial point cloud observations. Our model learns geometric features implicitly through convolutional occupancy networks, enabling local reasoning about graspability, collision-free contact regions, and object thickness. We leverage this understanding to generate force-closure compliant grasp pairs, which are further refined using a sampling-based optimization to correct for ambiguity caused by incomplete geometry. We evaluate our approach using analytical force-closure metrics, large-scale simulation experiments, and real-world robot evaluations on noisy partial point clouds of novel objects, demonstrating robust and physically stable dual-arm grasp generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19188
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a widely adopted non-destructive sensing technology for subsurface inspection in civil and transportation engineering. Despite its potential for pavement condition assessment, the large-scale application of GPR in automated inspection has two key challenges: the scarcity of annotated real-world datasets and the lack of deep learning models designed for the unique characteristics of 3-Dimensional (3D) GPR data. This study addresses these limitations by firstly introducing a cost-effective data preparation pipeline that integrates orthomosaic Red Green Blue (RGB) imagery with 3D GPR scans to generate annotated 3D GPR datasets. The proposed method uses the aligned segments of RGB and GPR data, using pavement surface images as a reference to transfer labels of surface-visible defects to corresponding GPR segments, enabling efficient large-scale annotation in a real-world dataset collected on a highway section under operation. In addition to the dataset contribution, we propose a specialised 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture incorporating residual connections, mixed convolutional kernel sizes, and both depthwise and channelwise attention mechanisms to enhance feature representation and defect classification. The model is evaluated on binary classification tasks for detecting patch and crack defects in pavement structures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms baseline architectures across multiple evaluation metrics. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of the designed architectural components. This work contributes a scalable and practical method for real-world dataset generation, along with a novel deep learning framework.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19177
Semantic segmentation demands a careful balance between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, which remains difficult to achieve for high-resolution imagery. Convolutional networks effectively model local patterns but struggle with long-range dependencies, whereas Vision Transformers capture global context at a high computational cost. While recent work largely focuses on encoder design, the bottleneck stage, central to contextual aggregation and information flow, has been relatively overlooked. We propose SiConMo, a lightweight yet effective framework, implemented in two variants: an RGB-only model (SiConMo) and a GME-enhanced variant (SiConMo$_\dagger$). We show that simplicity arises from a key design principle: at very low computational budgets, the bottleneck is the most efficient stage to integrate local and global context. SiConMo integrates three complementary components: a Token Pyramid Extraction Module for hierarchical multi-scale representation, a Transformer-Branched Depthwise Convolution block for bottleneck-aware context modeling, and a Feature Merging Module that preserves spatial structure while enhancing semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on ADE20K, PASCAL Context, Cityscapes, and COCO-Stuff demonstrate that SiConMo achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-off among lightweight semantic segmentation models, highlighting simplicity as a powerful design principle.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18979
Modern deep learning architectures have demonstrated strong performance in dental CBCT segmentation. One remaining crucial challenge is accurate tooth labeling in cases with missing or malpositioned teeth, which are highly relevant for dental practice. Transformer-based architectures should in theory be able to resolve such ambiguities using global anatomical context. However, due to the high resolution of CBCT volumes and the wide spatial distribution of teeth within volumes, dense patch-based volumetric processing faces an inherent trade-off. Computational costs limit the number of patches that can be used in self-attention and thus, one can either increase the extent of the context captured in self-attention or capture fine-grained structural details by using small patches, but not both. In this work, we present Teeth2Point, an efficient point-based transformer framework for dental CBCT semantic segmentation that can avoid this trade-off. Teeth2Point first localizes volumetric regions of interest (ROIs) surrounding teeth using a convolutional model, then converts ROIs into point tokens using adaptive sampling. A transformer model predicts accurate segmentations using the point tokens, which allow capturing global context while retaining high resolution. The transformer is first pretrained using self-supervised learning (SSL), in the style of DINO but using domain-specific augmentation strategies, followed by supervised finetuning. The SSL pretraining, which includes random token masking, provides robustness to complex anatomical variations. Compared with the strongest two-stage baseline, Teeth2Point improves abnormal-case performance by 1.44 DSC points on average across four datasets; relative to the first-stage nnU-Net, the gain is 1.9 points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18667
One of the most common reasons for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction failure is femoral tunnel malpositioning (ACL footprint center and tunnel orientation). Such failures may lead to the development of meniscal pathology and osteoarthritis. Accurate ACL femoral footprint identification is therefore essential for precise tunnel placement, restoration of the native knee joint mechanics, post-surgical knee joint health and prevention of graft failure. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) bring new opportunities to improve image-guided orthopedic surgery. However, at present, existing AI research focuses primarily on ACL segmentation and rupture classification based on pre- and post-operative magnetic resonance (MR) images. Identification of the ACL footprint center using deep learning methods has not been thoroughly researched. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore 3D deep learning models for ACL femoral footprint identification directly from 3D MR images. Two comprehensive 3D deep learning architectures were developed: a 3D graph convolutional neural network-based geometric model applied to 3D femoral meshes; and a 3D landmark-enhanced identification model based on 3D MR images. A total of 4883 right and 3087 left knee image sets were used from a publicly available database. Eighty percent (80%) were applied to model generation, and twenty percent (20%) were preserved for model testing. Both models achieved excellent performance; however, the image-based method outperformed the model-based method (average error of 2.1mm vs 2.8 mm). Thus, 3D deep learning provides a feasible clinical approach for ACL footprint localization and has the potential to improve ACL reconstruction footprint accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18012
Automated training of surgeons is one of the most crucial factors that significantly minimize surgical training risks and expenses. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge and available data from various surgeries, AI's involvement in surgical training is becoming very promising. It is recommended that at the early stages of AI development, it interferes in the surgery as a third agent alongside the trainer. As trust in AI increases, this process will lead to an AI agent acting as a trainer in the future. The first phase in which AI can intervene in the training process is to suggest an improved surgical path to the trainer. A platform must be constructed in the first step, to accomplish this task and to enhance the movement path of trainee surgeons. This paper introduces this platform along with an annotated capsulorhexis surgery dataset called the ARAS-Farabi dataset. In this research, a deep convolutional neural network is pre-trained with JIGSAWS and ARAS-Farabi surgical datasets that can extract surgical skill characteristics from surgery tool tip motion data. The proposed platform develops a reference model from the feature space of an expert surgeon's movement trajectory and proposes an improved path to enhance the skill of a novice surgeon. An optimization with two loss functions is utilized to create a path that raises the skill level of the novice surgeon's path while simultaneously predicting and preserving his/her intent. The results of this study reveal that, with the assistance of an AI agent, the trainee surgeon's movement path can be enhanced by at least 20 percent while maintaining his intentional objective. In addition to the recommended deep network, various tangible indicators have also been developed in this research to verify the level of trainee improvement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21441
Skeleton-based action recognition aims to recognize human actions from sequences of human joint coordinates. Most existing Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCNs) have achieved promising results by modeling skeletal structures with implicit spatial-temporal representations. However, our empirical study reveals a clear performance imbalance across different skeletal modalities, indicating that implicitly coupling spatial and temporal information limits the full exploitation of complementary structural and motion cues. Inspired by the ventral and dorsal pathways in human perception, we propose Dual-Pathway Graph Convolutional Networks (NeuroPath), which adopt a dual-pathway architecture for separate yet collaborative modeling of spatial and temporal information. Specifically, transformation units first convert the input into pathway-specific skeletal representations, allowing each pathway to focus on complementary aspects of human motion. To further capture coordinated joint behaviors and their interrelationships, we introduce a group graph convolution block that dynamically identifies key body parts and models their spatial-temporal dependencies. In addition, inter-pathway dynamic fusion modules integrate complementary inter-modal information across pathways, facilitating higher-level semantic interpretation of actions. Extensive experiments on Kinetics Skeleton 400, NTU RGB+D 60, and NTU RGB+D 120 demonstrate consistent performance improvements, validating the effectiveness of dual-pathway spatial-temporal modeling for skeleton-based action recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17487
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks threaten network availability, requiring a cognitive detection process that senses traffic, infers intent, and supports an adaptive response under severe class imbalance and non-stationary conditions. This paper proposes a Graph-based Generative Adversarial Network (GraphGAN) that serves as the cognitive detection engine for this task. GraphGAN captures the relational structure among traffic flows while addressing imbalance through adversarial generation of synthetic samples. Sequential flows are converted into $k$-nearest neighbor graphs using sliding windows to preserve feature-similarity and temporal dependencies among flows. The generator learns the distribution of DDoS attacks to synthesize realistic minority samples, while a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based discriminator distinguishes real from synthetic graph data. A separate GCN classifier, trained on the balanced dataset, performs the final detection decision. Evaluations on four benchmark datasets show that GraphGAN achieves superior accuracy, precision, and recall compared to state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. By integrating temporal graph construction, adversarial augmentation, and GCN classification, GraphGAN effectively models coordinated attack behaviors and mitigates class imbalance, providing a robust and topology-aware solution for intrusion detection in data-constrained environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17352
Recent monocular depth estimators achieve strong zero-shot generalization, yet often struggle to preserve fine-grained structures and object boundaries. We attribute this limitation to the prevalent combination of large-patch ViT encoders and convolutional decoders, as coarse tokenization can weaken pixel-level cues that upsampling cannot fully recover. To address this issue, we propose PXDepth, a discriminative monocular depth model that separates global context modeling from pixel-level depth prediction. Specifically, a large-patch ViT captures global scene context, while a pixel-space predictor composed of Context-Modulated Pixel Transformer blocks maintains high-resolution spatial representations throughout depth estimation. This design preserves fine structures and sharp boundaries without sacrificing global depth consistency. Across diverse zero-shot benchmarks, PXDepth combines faithful local geometry with competitive global depth accuracy while remaining efficient at inference. Our code and model are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16984
Hyperspectral reflectance spectroscopy enables non-destructive estimation of plant functional traits, yet current deep learning approaches process spectra as one-dimensional sequences, which limits how they capture long-range inter-band dependencies. We asked whether transforming 1D spectra into 2D image representations improves multi-trait prediction with convolutional neural networks (CNN). We compared nine transformations using EfficientNet-B0 on the GreenHyperSpectra dataset (7,897 labeled spectra, eight traits, 400-2450 nm), benchmarked against published 1D CNN results on the same split. Trained from scratch, the simplest transformation, a direct Reshape of the spectrum into a 2D grid, performed best ($R^2 = 0.684 \pm 0.001$) and improved on the state-of-the-art 1D baseline ($R^2 = 0.587$, $+0.097$). We then pretrained a 2D masked autoencoder (MAE-2D) on 139,000 unlabeled spectral images. Linear probing, which freezes the encoder and trains only a multilayer perceptron head, reached $R^2 = 0.646$ and exceeded every 1D self-supervised counterpart, including the fine-tuned MAE-1D ($R^2 = 0.641$). Under cross-dataset evaluation all models lost most of their accuracy and none beat the 1D baseline significantly. To identify which wavelengths drive each prediction, we applied Integrated Gradients and Grad-CAM and unfolded band importance back to the spectral axis. Protein ($r = 0.45$) and leaf water ($r = 0.33$) agreed with sensitivities simulated by the PROSAIL radiative-transfer model, while carotenoids ($r = 0.06$) and leaf area index ($r = -0.11$) did not, showing that the model reads established leaf chemistry for traits with sharp absorption features. The representational advantage of 2D spectral images, rather than architectural complexity or ImageNet pretraining, drives the gain over 1D approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16661
An accurate estimation of the state of health (SOH) underpins a safe and optimized use of the battery system. Although compelling, data-driven SOH estimation models typically require large amounts of high-quality labeled cycling data, while in practice such labels are often sparse in both quantity and coverage. Therefore, in this work, we propose a degradation-aligned self-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on a convolutional neural network-gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU) model, which learns aging-consistent representations from unlabeled data through a cycle-order ranking objective as the pretext task for pretraining, thereby enabling robust SOH estimation after fine-tuning on sparsely labeled data. Test results showcase that the proposed ranking-based SSL approach proves to endow the pretrained model with degradation-aligned information from unlabeled data, and after fine-tuning the model can carry out accurate, robust SOH estimation, even when only an extremely limited amount of 1% of unevenly distributed labeled training data is available, where the MAE of 1.718% and RMSE of 2.329% can be achieved on the test cell. In addition, in-depth analyses are presented regarding the influences of label distribution of battery degradation data. We believe this work could shed new light on SOH estimation of lithium-ion batteries under label sparsity in real-world applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16612
Most super-resolution models learn from paired data by supervising only the final high-resolution output. This provides little control over how the prediction should evolve between the downsampled observation and its fine target. We introduce GalerkinFlow, an equation-agnostic framework that turns each coarse--fine pair into supervision along an entire reconstruction path. At a random sample of intermediate states on the reconstruction path, the model predicts the coarse-to-fine residual velocity and uses coarse-anchor point to define a pseudo-endpoint. We show that the reconstruction loss of this pseudo-endpoint is exactly related to the intermediate velocity loss through a known time-dependent weight. Consequently, every intermediate state contributes supervision toward the same fine target, rather than serving only as an internal step toward an endpoint loss. Because intermediate states already reveal part of the missing fine-scale structure, we additionally supervise the coarse endpoint used during one-step inference. A finite-difference objective further constrains local spatial variation. GalerkinFlow combines convolutional features with scale-conditioned Galerkin operator mixing and requires no governing equation or physical metadata. It achieves the lowest raw-space errors among the evaluated equation-agnostic baselines on Navier--Stokes and Darcy Flow, while remaining competitive on DIV2K.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16546
Feature extraction for hyperspectral image classification is conventionally addressed using rigid tensor decompositions that fail to capture complex spatio-spectral interdependencies, or heavily parameterized convolutional neural networks that are computationally expensive. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces the Holistic Multivariance Decomposition (HMD) framework as a novel, end-to-end differentiable neural network layer. By explicitly separating independent single mode variations from cooperative higher dimensional interactions via learnable, matrix valued supports, the proposed HMD-0, HMD-1 and HMD-2 approximants are optimized jointly with a downstream classifier via backpropagation. Comprehensive evaluations across three benchmark HS datasets demonstrate that the higher level HMD layers achieve superior classification accuracy compared to classical learnable tensor baselines, including Tucker, Canonical Polyadic, and Tensor Train decompositions. Furthermore, HMD-1 and HMD-2 achieve a generalization capacity and training stability comparable to standard 2D and 3D-CNNs while requiring significantly fewer feature extractor parameters. These results demonstrate that the HMD framework provides a structurally robust substitute for traditional convolution in multidimensional HS image classification, offering high parameter efficiency and stability throughout the optimization process.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16241
UAV on-board vision systems are widely used for different activities, including monitoring in no-fly zones. In this case, the vision-equipped UAV streams a video to a ground server where an operator assists its activities. The latency of video transmission has a profound impact on the effectiveness of the operator assistance. However, most techniques available for video transmission still incur significant latency costs. In this paper, we propose a graph convolutional neural network-assisted (GCN-Assisted A2C) deep reinforcement learning (DRL) system model to find the optimal pixel-correlated area of a suspicious object. We combine the Lagrangian dual form with gradient descent to prevent lack of convergence and over- and under-penalization constraint violation during latency optimization. The proposed system model sends a sub-group pixel-correlated area of the frame from the UAV to the server rather than the transmission of the whole video frame. The proposed framework utilizes the GCN model to explore hidden representations of feature-correlated groups of pixels. Moreover, the GCN supervises the A2C model, which selects a subgroup to enhance transmission latency, thus supervising the training of UAV actions in A2C. Experimental results show that GCN-assisted A2C reduces video frame transmission latency together with false detection rate in UAV vision systems over other DRL and state-of-the-art models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16142
Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, while histopathological diagnosis is often affected by inter-observer variability and the substantial workload associated with manual slide examination. Although deep learning has shown considerable potential in computational pathology, comprehensive benchmarks that integrate tissue classification and region segmentation within a unified analytical framework remain limited. This study presents a two-stage deep learning framework for multi-class tissue classification and pixel-level histopathological region segmentation, accompanied by a systematic comparison of state-of-the-art architectures at each stage. For tissue classification, six models, a custom convolutional neural network, VGG16, DenseNet, MobileNetV3, a custom Vision Transformer, and YOLO11, are evaluated on a combined dataset of 39,000 images derived from LC25000 and LungHist700. The models distinguish between adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and normal lung tissue. YOLO11 achieves the best classification performance, with an accuracy of 98.38%, a five-fold cross-validation accuracy of 98.21 +/- 0.35%, and a macro F1-score of 0.98. For region segmentation, U-Net, ResNet-encoder U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and YOLO11-seg are evaluated using the GlaS gland segmentation benchmark. DeepLabV3+ obtains the highest Intersection over Union of 0.80 and a Dice score of 0.89, while YOLO11-seg achieves a comparable Intersection over Union of 0.79 using approximately 14x fewer parameters. The best-performing classification and segmentation models are subsequently integrated into an end-to-end framework, providing an accurate, computationally efficient, and reproducible baseline for automated histopathological image analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15915
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the main causes of impaired vision. A good and reliable automated grading system can make the screening process safer and more accurate. Because DR stages progress gradually, the task of grading disease severity naturally follows an ordinal structure in which neighboring classes share similar visual characteristics. In this study, ORViT-DR, a hybrid deep learning framework, is designed to improve DR grading from low-resolution retinal images. The proposed approach combines convolutional feature extraction with transformer-based global context modeling through a pre-trained ViT-Hybrid backbone, which integrates BiT-ResNetv2 with a Vision Transformer architecture. The approach is tested on the RetinaMNIST subset of the MedMNISTv2 dataset, which contains 28x28 retinal fundus images annotated with five levels of disease severity. To promote stable training and better feature learning, the training strategy applies progressive layer unfreezing, layer-wise learning rate decay, exponential moving average (EMA) parameter updates, and ensemble-based prediction during inference. Experimental results on the official RetinaMNIST test set show that the proposed method achieves 57.00% classification accuracy, along with a quadratic weighted kappa score of 0.5963 and a macro-F1 score of 0.4293. These results suggest that hybrid CNN-Transformer architectures can provide effective representations for ordinal retinal image analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16958
The garment manufacturing industry is under increasing pressure to improve product quality, reduce costs, and accelerate digital transformation toward Industry 4.0. One of the most challenging quality-control activities is sewing-line inspection, where defects such as broken stitches and skipped stitches are difficult to detect consistently through manual inspection. Human-based inspection is often affected by fatigue, subjective judgement, and inconsistent performance, resulting in defect leakage, rework, and reduced production efficiency. This study presents the development and validation of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based visual inspection system for garment sewing-line quality control. The system utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect sewing defects and was initially trained using black fabric and black sewing thread samples. Experimental testing was conducted on black, red, dark green, light blue, silver, and fluorescent yellow fabrics. The results demonstrated successful detection of jump sewing-line defects on black, red, and dark green materials, while performance limitations were observed for broken sewing-line defects and fabrics with significantly different visual characteristics, including light blue, silver, and fluorescent yellow colours. These findings indicate that model accuracy is strongly influenced by the diversity of training data and the ability to generalize across different fabric and thread colours.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21426